‘All I Really Need to Know…’ offers perspective
By Erich Murphy/Managing Editor
The Daily Leader - Pontiac, IL
Published: Thursday, July 10, 2008
Although billed as a comedy/drama, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” is a serious poignant and deep look at life through a little humor and music. It opens this evening at Chautauqua Park.
Under the direction of David Young, the Vermillion Players conclude the summer Theater-In-The-Park season with this production this weekend. The curtain rises tonight, Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 7:30 p.m.
Young, a music teacher in the Flanagan school district, certainly had a challenge in trying his hand at directing his first Vermillion Players production. If Wednesday’s special performance is any indication, good things can be expected as the company has added another quality director.
“All I Really Need to Know…” is a perspective on life, done in a series of vignettes in a narrative form. There are 23 vignettes split in the two-act show. With intermission, the play lasts nearly 2 ½ hours.
It is a production based on a series of books by Robert Fulhgam.
In a basic sense, the play follows life from being a kindergartner through the teen years, adulthood and death. It is a perspective on life.
Denny Read narrates the beginning vignette with the rest of the cast – Krista Chmiel, Danny Greider, Lindsey Schwahn, Nancy Waschle and Jim Wolfe – sitting in a kindergarten classroom.
They act as children do when asked various questions. But as in life, the children get older, and the answers become more serious. Where all the kids could sing and dance, by high school and college, maybe one or two do. It is a microcosm of change.
Each of the vignettes has a little child-adult play in them. In “Hide & Seek,” the scene opens with a kid hiding underneath a window at someone’s home. The narrator in this scene explains why the kid is there and how there always seems to be one kid who always hides so well that the others would give up looking.
The scene evolves into the serious overtone of mortality. A doctor finds out he has cancer and hides this fact from his family until he dies.
Death is revisited in a more direct nature a few more times. Charles Boyer is a look at the great actor who loved many women on the silent screen. But, in real life, as Read points out, Boyer had just one love – his wife of more than 40 years. Boyer took his won life two days after his wife passed away because, as Read notes in his soliloquy, he just could not live without her.
In the second act, a scene called “The Bench,” death is looked at with an enlightened perspective. In “A Tomb with a View,” the meaning of life is discussed.
There are also plenty of lighter vignettes in this production. In “Cinderella,” a little kid who was not selected for any particular role in the class’s production decided he wanted to be a pig.
“There is now” becomes the catch-phrase as Cinderella’s pig becomes the star of the show.
“Larry Walters Flies” is centered on the theme of just doing it.
The second act opens with a humorous look at language. It is followed with a look at overcoming imperfection.
“MOTB” – or mother of the bride – looks at a mother who is set on having the perfect wedding for her daughter. When the bride vomits at the alter, mother is devastated.
Moving forward 10 years, the bride and groom have a small party and mother has gotten over the embarrassment so much that she is the one laughing uproariously during the video of the wedding ceremony.
A third perspective of this production is summed up in “Problems and Inconveniences.” It shows a young person working at a resort and getting fed up with what he sees are injustices – like having to pay for his lunch and not liking what the owner serves him.
He complains to the night auditor, who lived for three years in Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp. Then the auditor explains his experiences by pointing out the difference between a problem and an inconvenience.
Your house burning down is a problem, everything else is an inconvenience, the older gentleman said.
Without giving any more away (too much has probably already been offered here), suffice it to say that this production gives the audience a wonderful and intelligent approach to life. There is humor and the themes of the Vignettes are serious to varying degrees.
It certainly is worth the time to watch and easy to appreciate the efforts of the director and cast in making “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” something worthy of the reviews it received when a professional company performed it in Chicago some time ago.
|
